Natural death and mayhem in Australia

From today's news:

* A teenager bitten by one of the world's most venomous snakes in Sydney has died in hospital with his family at his bedside.

* More than 700 people have been stung by bluebottle jellyfish on Gold Coast beaches, including eight children rushed to hospital, lifesavers say.

* The bodies of two men missing for up to two weeks have been found in a remote desert area in Western Australia.

It's a wonder tourists come here at all.

On the subject of bluebottle stings, I was at a beach close to Brisbane yesterday and saw a distraught girl, aged about 10, who had been stung. When we arrived, there were lots of kids in the water, but I had noticed bluebottles every 1 to 2 meters at the water's edge, and moved my kids to a part of the beach protected from the on shore winds (and where there were no bluebottles to be seen on the sand.) We saw the stung girl as we were leaving.

I have only had one sting in my life, as a young adult, but that's enough to know how extremely painful they can be. It always puzzles me why people still go in the water, and let their kids go in, when it doesn't take too much to notice if they are about.

I also am curious as to whether these nasty creatures are as common a problem in other countries' beaches as they are here.

Update: from this morning's paper, a story about a type of tropical ulcer that, strangely enough, can be caught from the distinctly un-tropical waters off southern New South Wales and Victoria. The story explains:

THE flesh-eating Daintree Ulcer has struck again, this time in NSW where a sea kayaker developed a gaping wound on his ankle.

Also known as the Bairnsdale or Buruli Ulcer, the ulcer destroys skin, fat, blood vessels and sometimes bone.

In this case, the 42-year-old man's ankle became infected while sea kayaking off the town of Eden in southern NSW.

A scab on his ankle developed into a large, open wound that continued to grow over five months before the ulcer was excised by Melbourne surgeons early last year.

Common in Africa, the ulcer is caused by the Mycobacterium ulcerans infection, first identified in coastal Victoria in 1948.

Infection rates have doubled in Victoria in the past three years with 61 people diagnosed last year.

61 people a year get tropical ulcers in Victoria?

Well, at least they understand its cause? Not really:

The reasons for outbreaks and transmission remain a mystery.

But Professor Johnson said direct exposure to mosquitoes was a factor.

"Wearing protective clothing and insect repellent appears protective," he said.

It's a dangerous world, hey.

More worrying demography

A litany of bad news about the demographic future in China is in an article re-printed in The Age this weekend:

Despite almost three decades of the one-child policy, the total population will reach 1.5 billion by 2033, well in advance of previous estimates of 2050...

Between now and 2016, the growth in the number of people of working age will increase by 10 million a year, meaning that much of China's remarkable economic growth will be taken up simply with finding them jobs rather than making them richer.

And then, in an extraordinary reversal as the effects of the one-child policy play through the generations, the population will age rapidly, so that by the 2040s the country will have 430 million people over the age of 60, compared with just 143 million now, relying on ever fewer workers to provide them with their livelihood....


...despite a ban on selective abortions, the discrepancy is getting worse. The national statistics show that 118 boys were registered for every 100 girls in 2005, up from 110 in 2000. In two southern provinces, Guangdong and Hainan, the figure had reached 130.

It's a little hard to be optimistic about how this is all going to work out for China. Maybe an excess of cheap labour continues to be good for a while for the West, until civil unrest kicks in.

Who's calling who amoral?

Emily Maguire complains in the SMH today:

In his much quoted and discussed essay in last October's The Monthly, Kevin Rudd wrote that "a Christian perspective should not be rejected contemptuously", and this is fair enough. We live in a pluralistic society and should respectfully listen to and debate all ideas regardless of their religious or philosophical origins.

Often, however, Christians like Rudd demonstrate a double standard by treating non-religious viewpoints with disrespect, if not outright contempt. Even as they call for tolerance when it comes to their own beliefs, they accuse the rest of us of being amoral.

Oh yes, and I see no contempt and oodles of respect all the time from secular politicians for the religiously informed morality of others.

I would have thought that the correct picture is that, in certain fields, both sides think they have the superior view, and the other side can see the claim of supremcy as "contempt" for their own view. It's just silly to suggest that the flow of "contempt" is all one way.

Comet reminder

Comet McNaught promises to be a great sight if you can see the western evening sky over the next few days. There are some gorgeous photos of it here and here.

Unfortunately, the cloudy Brisbane sky this morning looks very unpromising.

Also, a quick search of blogs has not turned up any blogger in Australia who has seen it yet.

Thanks, Dad

From the Times:

A duck that was feared to be extinct has been found alive and well in the wild after zoologists spent 18 years looking for it in the wrong sort of habitat. ...

Glyn Young, of the Durrell trust, has been searching for the duck, Aythya innotata, since 1989. He said: “The finding is extremely exciting. It was incredible. Some of the chicks could only just have hatched.”

Dr Young, who named his eldest daughter, Aythya, after the duck, added:...

It could've been worse; her father might have been a fan of the harlequin duck, otherwise known as histrionicus histrionicus. (Father to crying child: "Calm down, Histrionicus, calm down.")

(For all your common and taxonomic duck name needs, go here, type in "duck" and search for "common names")

Boy troubles

Found via Bryan Appleyard's blog is this fascinating article from Financial Times, explaining one theory about why socieities become violent:

In Mr Heinsohn's view, when 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population, violence tends to happen; when large percentages are under 15, violence is often imminent. The "causes" in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such "youth bulges" now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.

Between 1988 and 2002, 900m sons were born to mothers in the developing world and a careful demographer could almost predict the trouble spots. In the decade leading up to 1993, on the eve of the Taliban takeover, the population of Afghanistan grew from 14m to 22m. By the end of this generation, Afghanistan will have as many people under 20 as France and Germany combined. Iraq had 5m people in 1950 but has 25m now, in spite of a quarter-century of wars. Since 1967, the population of the West Bank and Gaza has grown from 450,000 to 3.3m, 47 per cent of which is under 15. If Mr Heinsohn is right, then Palestinian violence of recent months and years is not explained by Israeli occupation (which, after all, existed 30 years ago) or poverty (the most violent parts of the Muslim world are not the poorest) or humiliation. It is just violence.

More explanation as to why this should be:

The problem...is that in a youth-bulge society there are not enough positions to provide all these young men with prestige and standing. Envy against older, inheriting brothers is unleashed. So is ambition. Military heroism presents itself as a time-honoured way for a second or third son to wrest a position of respectability from an otherwise indifferent society. Societies with a glut of young men become temperamentally different from "singleton societies" such as Europe's, where the prospect of sending an only child to war is almost unthinkable. Europe's pacifism since 1945, in Mr Heinsohn's view, reflects an inability to wage war, not a disinclination.

Go read it all. As Appleyard indicates, as a general rule it's wise to be sceptical about simple explanations about human behaviour, but this one smells right.

Having too many nightmares?

Depression and sleep problems I have heard about, but a connection between having many nightmares and suicide attempts is new:

After factoring in other variables that may influence degree of suicidality, including other mental diagnoses, the investigators found that patients with frequent nightmares were almost four times as likely to be highly suicidal compared with patients who didn't report having nightmares.

Growth and prosperity

An interesting article from Spiked discusses the "paradox of prosperity", and argues it is not really something to worry about:

Contemporary critics of consumerism and popular prosperity are obsessed with what they see as a paradox. A central theme of their arguments is that economic growth does not make people happier. In their view, the pursuit of mass affluence is at best futile and is probably responsible for making humanity miserable. Often the growth sceptics argue that the pursuit of material goods is akin to a disease: they say the developed world is suffering from ‘affluenza’ or ‘luxury fever. Typically they conclude we should not attempt to become richer and often they argue for the pursuit of alternative social goals such as mental well-being.

Ben-Ami argues that:

The rise of mass affluence is an incredibly positive development. It has bolstered the quality of people’s lives enormously. But there never was any guarantee that such progress would bring happiness. One of the most positive qualities of human beings is that they often want more than they have got. They typically want the lives of their children and grandchildren to be better than their own. The growth sceptics would have us stay where we are or even retreat to living a life of lower living standards.

This is the section strikes me as particularly true:

What the growth sceptics identify as a lack of happiness can, at least in part, be more accurately described as social pessimism. There is no longer a sense that the future can be better than the present. On the contrary, potentially positive developments, such as technological or scientific advance, are routinely viewed with foreboding. Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that survey data sometimes appears to indicate that people feel miserable. The happiness pundits themselves have taken on the idea that, at least in material terms, the future cannot be better than the present.

Good reading.

Blame 9/11, I guess

Pamela Bone in The Australian today writes about the current wave of anti-religious publishing, and notes that there new titles are headed our way:

Atheist Manifesto by French philosopher Michel Onfray; Against Religion by Melbourne philosopher Tamas Pataki; Have a Nice Doomsday by American writer Nick Guyatt. The one I am most looking forward to is Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Oh great.

Being an atheist or agnostic herself, her article welcomes the new wave, and she makes some valid points (that the faithful are often their own worst advertisement for their religion being the main one.)

This paragraph deserves some comment:

Non-religious people are fed up with all the talk about the emptiness, the barrenness and lack of meaning in "secular society". It may surprise religious people to learn that our lives are not empty. Some people might need to believe in an afterlife in order to find meaning in this one; others don't. Some might need to believe in a creator in order to be awed by the majesty of nature; others don't. Some might believe in something higher than themselves and call it God; others believe in something higher than themselves and call it humanity or nature. It makes no difference to how morally they behave. Everything good in religion can be had without religion.

As I noted when talking about Dawkins before, I reckon that there is bit of hidden elitism in this, in that a good education and opportunity to indulge an interest in science or philosophy makes it easy to think you are being deep and meaningful, but such opportunity is not available or inherent in much of the world.

The problem is not that the irreligious have no "meaning" in their lives, as you could argue that anyone who more or less happily gets on with living would be able to say something gives their life meaning. The issue is more with whether what they say gives meaning is really just a diversionary interest from facing the real existential questions of life.

Such diversionary interests become more widely available the richer a society becomes, which is a counter-influence to the other idea that increased riches gives more free time to be "deep". The way that better health has made death less of an obvious reality helps hide the existential issues too, of course.

Of course I don't want people to suffer so as force them to think philosophically; I'll leave that position to the quasi-religion of the Greens.

[In my first version of this post I mentioned "low brow" diversions, which made me sound too much like David Williamson. I should have been more even handed and noted that the rich have their empty diversions too. As do the ostensibly religious. I think that the romantic versions of environmentalism, which has a strong foothold across all classes in the West, mostly avoids the issue of the deeper meaning of humanity too, by concentrating on the rest of nature.]

Anyway, as it happens I agree with Bone that it would be ideal if moral values and ethics could always be agreed upon by arguments which do not rely on revelation. (This is why I like Kant, and John Rawls also made a decent effort. But then again, Kant thought masturbation was worse than suicide.)

But these philosophical exercises are all arguments made by creatures with no complete knowledge of their own true nature (there is, for example, presently a rash of articles arguing again about whether free will even exists) or that of the universe overall. Largely for this reason, purely rational philosophical exercises are never going to reach positions on morals that are self-evident and compulsively universal, as it were. Pure rationality is always going to have a problem with ultimate motivation for being 'good' too.

I therefore think it is better to stick with the not always easy task of trying to piece together faith in revelation and reason, and that the world would be a safer place if this attitude was widespread.

[I think what I have just done is more or less a summary of the Pope's recent controversial address that mentioned Islam. I wasn't really thinking about it when I started, though.]

That UFO...

Everyone who has the vaguest interest in UFO's would have heard about the O'Hare airport case by now. For some links about it that readers may not have seen yet: the NPR audio report with the journalist involved gives a little bit more background about the story, and notes that an FOI request for radar and the control tower recordings hasn't been answered yet. (It is an odd feature that an FOI request was needed to get confirmation of the event.)

Paul Kimball is being very appropriately cautious about the case, and links to a few good sites with many rather unusual "hole in the clouds" photos.

My take: it sounds too good to be true. Still, it's great to have a bit of aerial mystery around.

About China

Early last year I linked to an article sceptical of long term prospects for China's economy, at least without political reform.

Here's another article along the same lines which is an interesting read.

Serendipity

A couple of years ago, I unsuccessfully tried to track down an article from a science magazine I had read about how you could easily build huge solar cell farms with a system of self replicating (but quite dumb) robots. I could not remember which magazine I had found it in.

[I have kept most of my old popular science magazines (starting with Omni in the late 70's and 80's, New Scientists and Discover magazine, and the occasional Scientific American.) My wife does not appreciate the hoarding of magazines that, admittedly, I rarely have cause to look at again, but there is a spare room at my office that can hold the boxes.]

Anyway, by pure chance, tonight I found someone in comments at Futurepundit has linked to the story, from 1995. (It was in Discover and is still on line.)

I love the WWW.

Get out your telescopes

This article indicates that, surprisingly, things are not as bad in one or two villages in the Sunni triangle as one might think:

For the past three years though, there has been little sign of the al Nasseris or other residents of Owja and Tikrit honoring Saddam's tribal largesse by resisting the American presence. Many, indeed, are said to work in U.S. Army bases, something that would earn them a death sentence in other Sunni towns.

"We have good working relations with Saddam's tribe," a local U.S. military spokesman confirmed. "We work on many infrastructure projects together and they support the governor."
U.S. commanders attribute the pacification of Saddam's tribal homelands to the close attention they paid to the area after the invasion. Fearing that it could become an insurgent haven, they established a large military base in Tikrit and made strenuous efforts to hunt down senior regime figures who lived there.

But the real reason for this post is this part of the article:

"Why have there been no big attacks in Owja?" one Sunni from Baghdad asked last week. "They have sold their ground to the occupation for the money, and now they are protecting them. They should feel ashamed because the Americans arrested their relative and their leader."

Such charges are denied by Owja residents, who say they grieve for Saddam as hysterically as the pilgrims flocking to his grave. One day last week, for example, the village was buzzing with claims that Saddam had appeared as the Man in the Moon the night before.

Uh oh

From The Sunday Times:

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.

Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

One good thing about such a plan, from the US point of view, is that if the nuclear "bunker busters" are actually made by Israel, this may deflect some of the blame for the attack from America.

Still, any use of nuclear weapon pre-emptively is a big step for a nation.

Those clever Japanese

From an interesting article in the IHT about how good Japan is at conserving energy:

Japan's population and economy are each about 40 percent as large as that of the United States, yet in 2004 it consumed less than a quarter as much energy as America did, according to the International Energy Agency, which is based in Paris.

On a per-capita basis, that means Japan consumed the energy equivalent of 2.8 million tons of oil per person in 2004, in contrast to 5.4 million tons per American. Germany, another energy- conscious country, used 3.2 million tons per person.

I guess the fact that the Japanese would have to have some of the smallest house/apartment sizes in the world, and live mostly in very high density urban areas, has something to do with this. Even so, it is quite cold in many parts in winter, unlike much of Australia, for example.

The other thing I did not know was that fuel cells can be purchased there (at heavy government subsidy) to generate electricity for the home:

One way has been a subsidy of about $51,000 per home fuel cell. This allowed Kimura to buy his cell last year for about $9,000, far below production cost. His cell, which generates 1 kilowatt per hour, provides just under half of his household's electricity, and has cut his electricity bill by the same amount, he said.

The device converts natural gas into hydrogen, which the fuel cell then uses to generate electricity. Heat released by the process is used to warm water.

The first two fuel cells were installed in the prime minister's residence in April 2005. Since then, 1,300 have been sold, according to the Trade and Industry Ministry. The ministry forecasts that as sales pick up, production cost will fall to about $5,000 by decade's end.

That's pretty impressive.

Can we stop talking about it yet?

It's good to see that the media is finding giving the fallout from the hanging a bit of a rest, although today many are running with the Egyptian's president's comments about Saddam becoming a "martyr".

Let's face it, he would been have treated as such by a large number of Arabs regardless of the exact circumstances of the last few minutes of his life. Denying him an (alleged) martyrdom completely, by letting him stay in a comfy European jail during the incredibly slow trial process of the international tribunal, ran the big risk that the Iraqi and Arab media would never have tired of showing him grandstanding in court and encouraging insurgency in his country. It was not a risk worth taking.

It is also interesting that the media does not make much fuss about the actual reaction in Iraq and elsewhere, in terms of violence, being rather muted in the last week. I would have predicted a surge, then a tapering off, and I guess that may still happen. But I still expect that the problems caused by his execution will not be as dire as the critics have predicted.

Shades of "A Clockwork Orange"

I missed reading this article by Richard Dawkins earlier this week. Saddam should not have been hanged, argues Dawkins, he should have been kept alive for scientific study.

Dawkins takes the anti-capital punishment line that would you expect (not that there is anything wrong with that, generally.) He generously allows this:

If President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

Dawkins goes on to write:

...the most important research in which a living Saddam Hussein could have helped is psychological. Most people can't even come close to understanding how any man could be so cruel as Hitler or Hussein, or how such transparently evil monsters could secure sufficient support to take over an entire country.

What were the formative influences on these men? Was it something in their childhood that turned them bad? In their genes? In their testosterone levels? Could the danger have been nipped in the bud by an alert psychiatrist? How would Hitler or Hussein have responded to a different style of education? We don't have a clear answer to these questions. We need to do the research.

Is Dawkins really serious here, or just seeking publicity? The objections are so obvious, but I will list them anyway:

* Most psychological research surely requires the co-operation of the subject, and who says Saddam would ever have agreed to it? If he did not agree, would it have been OK to force him to undergo brain scans, blood tests, etc. Should he just have been filmed 24 hours a day and had conversations secretly recorded? If he is true to his liberal principles, Dawkins would have to admit that if Saddam didn't co-operate, nothing useful could be done.

* Even if he did co-operate, who could believe his own version of his life and influences anyway? There is every reason to suspect that Saddam was not particularly good at reliable self assessment or insight, as are sociopaths everywhere. We don't need to study another one to tell us that.

* Dawkins' idea that everything in evil behaviour is reducible to scientific explanation leads to the idea that criminals should be "cured" rather than punished for wrongdoing. Such a view, with its de-emphasis on free will, is actually dehumanising, despite its (apparent) good intentions.

Silly uses for your robot suit

The Japan Times has an article about the creator of the HAL suit, which had some publicity a year or so ago and looks like this:


The suit, which may be commercially available sometime, is meant to give additional strength to those who need it. But its creator has another idea for its use:

....our robots can be used in the field of entertainment. For instance, by having HAL wearers also wear head-mounted displays, they can watch somebody walking through deep snow and, by having HAL put pressure on their legs, they can feel the sensation themselves. Or we can create a situation where you might be watching a movie at home with a head-mounted display and a HAL suit on, then feel your right leg suddenly being harshly pulled just as Sadako (a creepy character in the horror movie "Ring") is grabbing someone's right leg in the film!

So, for those of you who don't already jump enough at surprises in scary movies, here's a possible answer. It sure is some trivial use for expensive technology.

Of course, what all boys long to see is cyborg soldiers in battle. That would be cool.

The black hole in Ireland

New Scientist's Christmas issue ran an interesting story about a physicist who thinks that a historical report of a "ball lightning" type phenomena seen by one man in Ireland in 1868 may have actually been caused by a tiny black hole. Full access to the article is not (yet) available on line, but sometimes New Scientist drops the restriction after a couple of weeks. I had to buy the paper issue.

The report in question is intriguing, because it involved the ball lightning apparently carving a trench in the soil/peat it passed over. I have read about ball lightning before, but had never heard of this effect. The article claims that the damage alleged caused is still visible at the site.

The idea that a small primordial black hole (left over from the big bang) was at the heart of the glowing ball assumes that Hawking radiation does not exist; a point which very, very few scientists seem willing to seriously consider as a possibility. (I don't have time to provide the links right now, but go search this blog for "black holes" and you'll see what I mean.)

It seems clear that a lack of a quantum gravity theory means there is a good degree of uncertainty about the finer points of how HR would work, particularly at the end of the evaporation process. That an evaporating micro black hole may leave a remnant, the exact nature of which I have not really seen explained clearly, seems a possibility still very much up in the air.

The black hole - ball lightning theory also has to come up with some fancy footwork to explain why the ball lightning bounced along the ground, and didn't eat up the earth by now. (In fact, the article does not mention at all what the physicist thinks was the eventual fate of the black hole in question.)

Still, it is interesting and potentially relevant to the issue of possible danger from the LHC.

Gore gored

If you happen to think that Gore Vidal is a self-important bore, you will find plenty of support for your view in an article in Salon (of all places.)